Day 8: Badlands/Mt Rushmore

Enjoying the great outdoors at Badlands National Park

Day 8 - Tuesday, August 10

After a morning of driving another unnecessary 90 miles, crossing back into Mountain Time Zone for the second time in two days, and flipping off the town of Kadoka on the way, we reached the Badlands.  Although seeing it in the distance from the road there wasn’t anything immediately impressive, the difference in landscape and elevation was a sight for sore eyes after days of driving past empty fields and farms.  When we first got in the park, we did a quick walk to the Door and Window trails, which were more of lookout points than a hiking trail.  Our planned hike for the day was the Notch Trail, which was pretty highly reviewed and was listed as moderate to strenuous by the park guide.  The total distance of 1.5 miles round trip wasn’t much, but it featured a lot of elevation changes including a rope ladder climb and some nice views of the valley below once we got to the end.  I did a little bit of additional hiking off the marked trail to get to some higher elevation which was fun too  The sights itself weren’t exactly mindblowing, but it was a solid first hike, the weather was great, and it was good getting some exercise in.  It made me pretty excited for the several days of hiking I’ll have next week in Arches, the Grand Canyon, and a couple other National Parks.  After the hike, we cooled down for a bit and then did the 40 mile scenic drive through the most popular portions of the Badlands before reconnecting on I-90 at Wall Drug in Wall, South Dakota.

Obligatory picture in front of Mt. Rushmore

Wall Drug is probably best known for its ridiculous billboard marketing campaign.   They begin advertising itself hundreds of miles away, and as you get closer there are different signs for it every hundred feet or so.  It’s really just a tourist trap, but they offer free water, some cheesy photo opps, and an area to eat lunch.  We took advantage of all of the above.

Mount Rushmore was the afternoon activity.  Not overly exciting, but definitely something I wanted to see in person, so I got to cross that off the list  There was a little walking path which went around the base of the mountain and had closer viewing points than the main area.  We saw a short presentation about the history of the sculpting process, and then we went on our merry way.

Our campsite at Custer State Park

Next up on the itinerary was a shopping trip at Safeway to get some food and supplies for our first night of camping.  It took a little while to get everything, and the drive from Rapid City to our campgrounds in Custer State Park took a lot longer than I anticipated so we got to the grounds a little before dark.  The campground area seemed pretty nice, we saw some deer on the drive, and our spot was pretty close to a giant lake.  We pretty much had any camping supply we could possibly want and probably lot of other unnecessary ones jammed in the car, but the only thing I couldn’t find was a lighter, so we had to keep borrowing it from our neighbor.  Without a ligher, and with a lack of good firewood, we couldn’t really produce too much heat, and our attempt to cook pasta on the fire proved to be a lengthy process.  After an hour or so we finally had a late dinner of sausages and pasta.  We hung out for a bit, and then hit up the tent for some sleep.

Miles traveled today: 302

Miles traveled total: 2,275

States traveled: 9